Rainer Schultze-Kraft

Professor Rainer Schultze-Kraft was a German agronomist who specialized in tropical agriculture since his graduate studies at the Justus-Liebig University, Giessen, Germany. He joined CIAT (now the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT) in 1973 as Visiting Research Associate and, after receiving his PhD from Giessen, in 1976 as Germplasm Agronomist of the Beef Production Program (later: Tropical Pastures Program). He was a founding member of CIAT´s Genetic Resources Unit and built up the CIAT Tropical Forages collection with more than 20,000 wild-plant accessions of potential forage plants, almost half of which stem from collecting expeditions that he conducted, in partnership with national institutions, in numerous countries of tropical America, Africa, Southeast Asia and in tropical China. He was also involved in the characterization, evaluation and cultivar development of the collected and introduced germplasm, particularly forage legumes, where he specialized in the genera Centrosema and Stylosanthes.

In 1991, Rainer left CIAT to take on a professorship at the Centre for Agriculture in the Tropics and Subtropics, University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany. After retirement in 2007, he returned to Colombia with continuing links to the CIAT Tropical Forages Program as consultant. He established in 2012, in cooperation with an Australian colleague, the open-access online journal Tropical Grasslands-Forrajes Tropicales published by CIAT and the Alliance, and was the journal´s managing editor until 2020.

In 1997, Professor Schultze-Kraft was elected Fellow of the Tropical Grassland Society of Australia. In 2009 he was granted the CIAT Emeritus status and, in recognition of his long-standing cooperation with tropical China as CIAT scientist, received in 2016 the Chinese Government Friendship Award and in 2022 the International Science and Technology Cooperation Award of Hainan Province, China.

Professor Schultze-Kraft is (co-) author of about 300 scientific publications. After living in Colombia and Germany, he passed away in February, 2024.